Re: What setup method is planned for pkgbase?

On 10/05/23 11:44, Harry Schmalzbauer wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 
> back in times (sysinstall(8) aera), when geom(4) was extended for GPT 
> (and gpart(8) got the ability to write GPT labels) I created my own, 
> highly customized installer, which has the drawback that it still 
> requires a special distribution media (iso with cpio archives). My plans 
> to support the official ISO never materialized, but it's still providing 
> a sophisticated (auto-partitioning) ZFS and UFS setup job likewise for 
> UEFI and BIOS based system (emerged from a embedded project) and 
> provides a radical update concept: newfs (UFS factory snapshot with 
> auto-backup+restore, resp. new ZFS datasets). It is focused on 
> productive servers, with as much read-only mounts as possible (and 
> omitting dev bytes on those strictly productive machines) and was a 
> sysinstall(8) substitution.
> 
> Since the ammount of machines to deploy massively decreased for me, and 
> pkgbase seems to be more or less ready ('make packages' left a beautiful 
> repo), I want to replace my customized installation methods (transfering 
> all it's features for optional usage).

I don't have definitive answers to the other questions (details below), 
but I'd suggest you use poudriere to generate the pkgbase repos. It has 
the advantage of only replacing required packages on subsequent builds, 
which helps if you happen to update and only a few files are modified 
(leverages repeatable builds)

> I'm planning to use whatever FreeBSD uses by default.  Currently, it's 
> bsdinstall(8) I guess (which I never used), but I'm not sure if it is 
> planned that bsdinstall(8) will be made pkgbase compatible.

I rarely install new machines from scratch, but for now my strategy has 
been to perform a classic install and then just dump base packages over 
them, removing unwanted packages later.

Crude but works, for my needs. Definitely not acceptable if you want to 
automate installing more than one machine at a time. So I have little 
insight in this regard.

-- 
Guido Falsi <mad@madpilot.net>